Song of the Earth

Book 3: The Mortymer Trilogy

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

Mostyn Evan and his family, miners turned bargees, wage a glorious but hopeless struggle against rapacious coalmasters, Irish navvies, the ravages of cholera, and the bullying illegal Unions. As they ply their trade between the furnaces of Cyfarthfa and the lush beauty of the Neath Valley, they pray and fight, sing and love, and face each obstacle undaunted with all the stubbornness and exuberance of Wales itself. This is the third instalment in Alexander Cordell's magnificent saga of nineteenth century Wales that began with classic bestseller The Rape of the Fair Country.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

I REMEMBER red light that beamed and flashed on the black clouds above Dowlais. Distantly, on the wind, came the bellow of the iron as the furnacemen built up the heat. The iron ran liquid in the moulds, and I could hear it sighing and moaning as they tore it from the rock by fire. The mountains trembled. The old workings by Pont Storehouse echoed thunder to the beat of the drop-hammers. The new rail consignment for Spain belled and clanged in the stackyards. Flinging aside the Dowlais blanket I got out of bed and ran to the window, shivering in the night-shirt my mam had cut down from my brother Ifor last Monday, before she had been taken ill. Toes crinkling to the nip of the boards, I stared into a world of frost, a land made beautiful in hoops of gold and crimson as they tapped the furnace bungs from Pontyclun to Merthyr, and the little rivers of sparkling iron hissed and leaped into shape to last a million years.

Bitter old winter, that one in 1845. Indignant to the frost the skeleton trees crouched in moody scarecrows down Bridge Street, Merthyr, and the mountains beyond were all over white like Church of England wedding-cake, and above the freezing hills of Brecon the moon was sitting on the peaks all bare and beautiful: down the red-black, flickering street the glazed China dogs of Solly Jew raised their poodle sniffs at a world of ice and fire. Daft old world, come to think of it, with the iron up there being boiled to a frizzle and us down here freezing to death.

‘What you doing out there, boy?’ asked Gwen, from the bed.

A minute back she was out to the wide, her red button nose snuffling over the Dowlais blanket, this being so called since my wicked old Granfer Ben Evan lifted it off a gentry bed twenty years back, and what he was doing around gentry beds is anyone’s guess, said Dewi, my brother, he being an expert in this particular line himself.

‘What you doing, Bryn?’ asked Gwen, now beside me, all podges and bright curls, aged seven, three years younger than me: amazing how the dead will up and walk when bent on other people’s business.

‘Just looking,’ I answered.

‘Aye? Well, Dada said no looking for us, just bed.’

‘I want to see our mam go,’ I said.

‘Gran will come in and hell will set alight.’

Setting alight now, it seemed. Dowlais again, burning and flaring on the snow, reflecting off the slate roof of Bethania, the little square cottages with their backs to the Taff withering and shrinking into strange shapes: faintly, above the thunder of the iron, I heard the beating of the accident gong. Gwen stiffened against me, finger up, eyes switching. ‘Listen!’

I thought I heard the scream and scurries and for God’s sake this and for Christ’s sake that: legs one moment, mounds of rags and blood the next. They were always catching it up in Dowlais especially, said my father; as good as the Shambles slaughter-house any day of the week; one chopping block for men, another for animals.

‘Any sign of Mam yet?’ asked Gwen, and she put her arm around my neck and her hair against my cheek and I was warm and soft inside me for this sister, though you would never have thought us related. For Gwen was all wrist bangles and double chins, and I was inches taller, a herring in boots, said Ifor.

My big brothers Dewi and Ifor were sixteen, and identical twins when it came to womanising, but alike in no other respect. Six feet in socks, Ifor was a tap-room brawler, with a dent in his nose and raging black hair: Dewi, topping him by an inch, was dark, handsome and slim, with a fierce Silurian face: very hot for a revolution, was Dewi, and down with the Queen.

Gwen now, hugging herself, her breath steaming on the window.

‘Cold to hell, I am, boy,’ said she. ‘Back into bed with us, is it, and leave Mam till morning?’

‘By morning she will be gone,’ I answered.

‘Eh, dafto! Hobo Churchyard do come in daylight.’

‘Coming at midnight, just to cheat us children,’ I said.

‘O, aye? Hobo is too frit to bury in the dark—too much on his conscience, says Sharon.’

‘Listen!’ I whispered. ‘Is that Sharon crying down the street?’

Sleeping next door but eight was my sister Sharon, we being a bit short of room in by here.

‘Not Sharon,’ replied Gwen, getting in under the blanket. ‘It is Mrs. Willie Shenkins.’

‘Crying for our mam?’

‘Crying for her Willie,’ said Gwen.

Night and day, frost or shine, Mrs. Shenkins sits out the back of her Number Sixteen Bridge Street, Merthyr, hoping for a chill that will send her to her Willie. Big for his age was he and down in the low levels of the Cyfarthfa collieries since the age of six, but they brought him up last winter because his eyes were getting bad, like the ponies. And the agent sent him over to the puddlers, and the glare took him when they were tapping the bungs into the six-ton cauldron, and a puddler pulled him clear. Later, he fell again, head first, so they cooled the cauldron with Willie inside, and gave it a decent burial; Chapel and Church of England, Roman Catholic and Jew, and God be with Willie Shenkins, they sang, as Willie went six feet down, what was left of him, in the Company cauldron.

There was no sound in the room but Mrs. Shenkins sobbing.

‘Do not mind her,’ said Gwen. ‘Not quite a full pound she isn’t.’

Often I had seen the women cry in Merthyr, with their sack aprons to their faces, for a death or a drunk, but nobody ever cried in my life like Mrs. Shenkins cried for Willie.

I said, ‘Gwen, you there?’

‘Aye, man,’ said she, her nose over the blanket.

‘When Hobo Churchyard comes he will bring two black horses with feathers.’

‘Aye, and the preacher and the Inspector of Nuisances.’

‘Like when old Jack Curly died, remember?’

‘A beautiful death had old Jack Curly,’ Gwen said warmly. ‘They cried and sang all the way to the chapel.’

I said, ‘But first they burned the bedding and sprinkled carbolic on the floor of the house. Will the Inspector do that here?’ I got into the bed beside her and she was hot and plump like a Christmas chicken, wings and elbows going, crying:

‘Eh, hop it! Cold as ice, you are, and chattering to freeze.’

‘Black horses do frit me, especially at funerals.’

‘White horses for weddings are best,’ said Gwen.

I did not speak to her.

‘Whisht, you, Bryn. Do not cry,’ she said.

Footsteps on the landing, open came the door. My father stood with the lantern held high, his shadow on the wall like an ape dancing, and my grandmother said:

‘Do not heed them, Mostyn. Look, dead asleep for a grave, they are.’

Hand in hand we lay, Gwen and me, breathing for embalmed corpses.

‘Take her, Mostyn,’ she repeated.

But I was at the window when Hobo Churchyard came with a cart and a droopy black horse. Ifor and Dewi carried Mam out, and they stood in the snow with their lanterns painting circles of yellow about their feet. Later, the Inspector of Nuisances came and burned the bedding. Nose pressed to the window I watched the black cinders spread where the fire had been: up the stairs came the smell of the carbolic. Gwen said from the bed, ‘It do not seem right to put carbolic where our mam has been.’

I was watching the road and the undertaker’s cart moving black and squat along the road to Vaynor. Gwen said, ‘Has Mam gone, then?’

‘Aye.’ There were black wheel-ruts in the snow, I remember.

‘Come on in, boy.’ She held the blanket wide.

Hobo Churchyard had gone. And behind the Castle Dowlais went on fire again, lighting the room with furnace glow.

I bowed my head to the flashing light of the window.

‘It will be a good death tomorrow, mind,’ said Gwen, ‘with singing and crying and plenty to eat.’

NEXT morning, after my mam had gone, it was as if she had never existed, save that Gran laid her place at table. Otherwise everything was much as usual, with Ifor and Dewi side by side at the bosh, shaving, braces dangling, holding up nose-tips and making faces at the razor. Most mornings I would stand on the chair without a back and look into the mirror they looked into, this being about seven foot up, but no sign of whiskers rooting yet, black, fair or ginger, said Dada. This morning, however, my father said little, being in a chapel-quiet and with pew-dust in his heart, said Gran.

Gorgeous was my gran, but more of her later.

‘There is a beautiful day, Mostyn, isn’t it?’

Silent he sits, fist on knee.

‘Chilly, mind, but beautiful.’

There is no sound but the scur of the razors and the scrape of hobnails on the flags of the kitchen.

‘A decent meal when we get back, son, and your slippers by the fire, eh?’

‘Dada,’ I said, coming down from the bedroom.

‘Leave him, Bryn,’ whispered Gran.

‘You heard Mrs. Ten Benyon has another one developing?’ asked Dewi.

‘Please do not be indelicate,’ said Gran from the hob.

Bacon on the go now, sizzling sweet and brown, the pig playing a large part in our existence, said Dada, servant and master, and no wild flower do smell as beautiful.

‘What is indelicate in having a baby?’ asked Ifor.

‘Indelicate when applied to Mrs. Ten Benyon,’ said Gran, ‘and the children are listening. Up to table sharp now, for it is a busy day coming.’ For head of the house was our gran. They can say what they like about Welshmen, fighting at the drop of a hat and solid in the jaw, but their women run the households. My beautiful sister Sharon came into the kitchen then, she having slept with Mr. and Mrs. Isan Chapel next door but eight, they having a spare room because of a relative now deceased, there being no room in our house for fourteen-year-old sisters with ten-year-old brothers peeping over bed-clothes; and she winked at me as she pulled her chair to the table. Wicked in the eye was she, and Welsh dark, with long black hair in waves on her shoulders to drive the boys mooney in town, like Mrs. Ten Benyon must have looked about half a century back, said Dewi, when the Irish unloaded themselves at Fishguard. Three of them came to Merthyr, one after the other, and they all collected Mrs. Ten Benyon, and in her good time she saw the boots off and the shrouds on all three of them, but they got their own back by landing her with ten boys. ‘Eh, dear me,’ Mrs. Ten used to say, ‘thirteen men I have known in all lengths from six inches to six-feet-six—men, all men, I am, pestered in the breast and loins.’

‘There is a slut for you, mind, talking like that,’ said Gran, forking the bacon, ‘and us decent Chapel people. Fourteenth on the way, is it?’

Prim as a poke-bonnet one moment, scandal very sweet the next, for Gran.

‘The new agent Man Arfon been seen in the vicinity, they say,’ said Sharon.

My father stirred at the grate. ‘Do you think we could have a little more hospitality towards Mrs. Ten Benyon and a little less of the scandal, considering it is a rather special day?’ and this put us all quiet since my father was gentle when it came to women labouring in mine or childbirth, never passing one in town without knocking up his hat. I scrambled up to table then but Gran pulled me out of it.

‘You been out the back?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then out and see to it and back here with hands washed.’

It is astonishing to me how people arrange such matters, me being the best to know the call or not, and, anyway, Gwen was out there all dopey from the bed, and once I opened the door in haste and she came out head first, curled up on my boots and slipped off again without a sigh.

‘Hurry up,’ and I took my fist to the panel.

‘Hop it,’ said Gwen.

The dawn mist was curling smokey fingers round the back; the old tin bath on the nail crying at being out all night, and drips from the water-spouts freezing teeth in sockets as I broke off an icicle and sucked, waiting for Gwen. All down the wall the colliers and furnace-workers were getting up in shouts and groans, and I saw in the eye of my mind six hundred bare elbows sawing on bread boards and cheese being hunkered for doorsteps and small-beer and ale being poured into flagons for the scourers, rodders and rollers of Cyfartha. Dogs were fighting for breakfast scraps, cats belting each other down alleys, babies shrieking. Hairless and wrinkled, the aged teetered from the beds out of habit or to let a shift-worker in: like Mr. Isan Chapel next door but eight, aged eighty. Blinded by a furnace blow-back, was Mr. Isan Chapel, poor soul, and every morning trying to find his way down the garden path to the little seat that hung over the river, and no help from his bulldog missus either, she being upper class since collecting third prize for a sampler from Lady Charlotte Guest, and she thought nothing of hammering poor old Isan if he didn’t behave. Only five feet high was he, and never got used to the blindness, but wandering, arms out, with no sense of direction, said Dada, and he could even remember Bacon the Pig of Merthyr selling cannon to America in the War of Independence, whatever that might be. Seeing him, I vaulted the garden wall and went to guide him, for I would never forgive myself if he fell in the Taff as he did last autumn, and half the neighbourhood floundering around with ropes and clothes-poles, trying to fish him out until my dada arrived and waded into the river and carried him to the bank.

‘Eh dear, you poor little soul,’ said my father.

I will always remember him kneeling there with Mr. Isan Chapel held against him. And the circle of faces above them was the dregs of the community, not one of them Welsh; stamping, guffawing, until my father rose, facing them.

‘Because you live like animals do you have to act like them?’

Half-drowned was Mr. Isan Chapel.

I said now, steadying him, ‘You all right, sir?’

‘As right as I will ever be, child, if it wasn’t for the indignity,’ said he in Welsh, for he came from King Arthur stock up in the beautiful Prescelleys.

I got him on the seat. ‘Shut the door, is it, Mr. Chapel?’

Often he left the door open facing the river, which was daft, for the Pont Storehouse urchins would arrive and heave clods at him, trying to hit him off the seat. And there was no point in me showing him respect if he was going to sit there heading off clods.

‘Bryn,’ called Gran from the back.

‘Ay ay!’

‘What you up to, then?’

‘Helping Mr. Chapel.’

‘Good lad. Come now, the bacon is leathering,’ she cried, and I was away sharp for the bacon, for if there is anything I cannot stand it is old age and its indignity, and I only helped to make a good impression on Dada: clods it would be from me also, given half a chance.

Cut my throat before I end up as helpless as that.

‘A good boy you are, Bryn,’ said he, ‘helping Mr. Isan Chapel.’

After breakfast, my father said, ‘No work today, no school. We are going up to Vaynor, to be with Mam.’

Strange, come to think of it, that our mam should be Church of England, she having the blood of the Cornish tin-miners in a place called Bodmin, while on my father’s side the family have been Methodist since Job was a comforter. Up in the room with Gwen I got into Dewi’s best home-spun trews cut down, boots to shave in, a shirt front with no arms and tail and a starched collar under my ears. With my hair smoothed down and watered like the mountain fighters I stood rigid because of the creases, waiting for Gran.

‘Am I pretty?’ asked Gwen, turning in her funeral dress, and I did not spare her a glance, for you can dress a County Cork porker in a crinoline and never make him presentable. I would prefer her seventeen, for girls of seven I do hate, all wriggles and giggles and baby fat, with her black-buttoned boots to her knees and red bows in her long, plaited hair. ‘A throw-back, this one,’ said my father, ‘we are dark and she is fair, her blood coursing from the old Brythonic plains. But she is a Celt, remember—same as you.’

‘Bows out,’ said Gran, coming up the stairs. ‘It is your mam’s funeral you are attending, not Michaelmas Fair.’ She hooked me closer for inspection. ‘Face soaped up, washed behind the ears. Eh, my!’ And a great softness sprang into her eyes. ‘There is a sight for a dead mam, and your Granfer Ben proud in the stomach to see you so respectable.’

Stuffed and cooked we had this Granfer Ben, for breakfast, dinner and tea.

‘Yes, Gran.’

‘Be a good boy now, leave the crying to the women.’

‘Yes, Gran.’

‘And Bryn …’

I turned back to her and she did a queer little sniff and pulled me hard against her. ‘Away,’ she snapped, heaving me off. ‘Are we standing around all day?’

Worth a mention, this gran.

A big-fleshed woman, she was, vigorous in the breast and glorious in the brow, looking seven foot high with her hair piled up on a comb, the same as Queen Victoria, and the best layer-out this side of Brecon. Five sons she bore my wicked old Granfer Ben, every one but my father being taken by the Top Town cholera. On my mother’s side, apparently, things came respectable. The worst thing that happened in her branch was when my Uncle Waldo went a semi-tone flat exalting every valley in the public hall in Dowlais in 1835, and within a week he was emigrated to North America on the end of a boot, the Welsh being a trifle sensitive when it comes to disrupting Handel. Aye, practically gentry on my mother’s side, said Gran, the men collecting shiners through turning the other cheek to the bruisers, which is a bloody stupid thing to do in Dowlais at the best of times, said Ifor. Three times to church every Sunday, the men in top hats and frock coats, the women in bonnets and crinolines with bowed good mornings left and right and alcohol and fisticuffs a long way down their list, and fornication something that was practised in London only, mainly Whitechapel.

‘But,’ said Gran that talkative day, ‘your people on my side of the family do not stand deep examination.’ And she told of Granfer Ben who was large in the copper-works band down the Vale of Neath and singing the Messiah, sounding the trumpet double bass while shaving with the cut-throat, being glorious in the lower registers. Handsome devil, apparently, handy with the mountain fighters and spare-time on the females.

‘But best of all with the Penny Gaffs on Fair Day?’ cried Sharon.

‘Played in the company of Siddons, give him credit,’ said Dada, ‘and under Macready of the Swansea theatre!’ and he cried, taking off Granfer Ben, ‘“For beauty, starv’d with her severity, cuts beauty off from all posterity. She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair to merit bliss by making me despair.”’

‘Romeo and Juliet!’ shrieked Sharon, who was strong for the Penny Gaffs and people like Taliesen the Poet who had long hair, and I wouldn’t trust him with a maiden aunt as far as I could throw him, let alone the likes of Sharon.

Most artistic, my family—Dada and Sharon mainly, while Dewi, Ifor and me were more bent on thick ears and ale and saw-dust. Gran said:

‘Eh, grief, he was a born actor—this Shakespeare chap was clay in his hands, and very keen on the opposite sex—did my best, but no woman on earth could suffice him. And when Brigham Young’s people came to the Top Towns on speculation, he was off to Salt Lake City and the Latter Day Saints. No sight nor sound of him since—must have died of women, I reckon.’

‘There are worse ways of dying,’ said Dewi, and I saw my father give him a queer old look and a sigh.

‘Oh, he must have been exciting, exciting!’ cried Sharon, and she picked a piece of herring out of Gran’s pan and sucked it reflectively, her actress eyes, large in her high-boned face, going dreamy in the lamplight.

Excellent with the herrings was my gran, doing acres of them in the big, black pan on the shining, black-leaded grate; all sizzling and sending up a silver perfume, glad to be out of that murky old Baglan Bay and into the bellies of Mostyn Evan and fighters. Ach, I do love the nights of the herrings, with Sharon at the ironing and Gwen on the samplers and Gran kneeling by the hob with the big wooden spoon out of the wash-tub.

‘Damned old reprobate he do sound to me,’ observed Ifor, who, on times, could be solid marble between the ears.

‘Who, now?’ asked Gran, looking up from the herrings.

‘Granfer Ben,’ said Ifor, all unsuspecting, and I saw my father open the Cambrian and get well down behind it, always a sign of trouble afoot.

‘As God is my judge, I’ll not be responsible,’ said Gran, putting her spoon under Ifor’s nose. ‘You sit there passing lewd remarks …’

‘But, Gran …!’

‘Don’t you gran me, you useless big oaf, scandalising your own grandfather,’ which sounded Irish, and was, for Gran always went Limerick when under deep provocation.

‘Sorry, Gran,’ cried Ifor, backing off.

‘And you big louts also—you hear me?’

‘Oh, yes, Gran!’ Dewi and I shouted in chorus.

‘No finer man than your Granfer Ben walked in twin boots, and there’s no apology for a man here fit to clean them!’

‘Yes, Gran,’ we all said, including Sharon and Gwen, and my dada stirred at the fire, took out his pipe, and grumbled:

‘Smitten with the tongues of angels, we are. Why the hell we have to have Granfer Ben every time we have herrings do beat me,’ and he rose. ‘We will wash all tears from eyes. My father, Ben Evan, was the finest Falstaff in the Swansea theatre, and my mother, Ceinwen Evan, is the best cook in Christendom. All wounds healed. Up to the table sharp, sharp, sharp!’

And now we were off to the funeral.

‘Bryn, Gwen, Gran!’ called my father from the bottom of the stairs. ‘It is half past ten and we are off directly.’

‘Coming, Mostyn,’ Gran called back, and took our hands in hers, saying, ‘No tears, remember. Your dada is dying inside and is covering it with smiles. I will not have him brought down, you hear me?’ She swallowed hard and cried deep in her throat. ‘You hear me, children?’

‘Yes, Gran,’ we said, hand in hand now.

And she led the way down to the pony and trap.

She could have been going to a wedding for all the pomp and size of her, and when she stepped on the back step of the trap the pony up in the shafts, but we did not giggle, we did not even speak.

This is living on the tip of tears, on the breath between grief and laughter.

But often, I believe, Gran cried for Granfer Ben.

Some mornings, when she came down, her face was pale and proud and riven with unshed tears, and her lips were as red as cherries as if she had been kissed in sleep.

Aye, well, let me gabble on about grans and granfers and funeral suits and herrings and Latter Day Saints, for while I am doing this I am not thinking about my mother.

And forget the day in November when we put her six feet down in Vaynor.

COME spring, I was still at school on Tramroadside, for although most children were down the mines before the age of ten, my father reckoned that I was a bit of a scholar and ought to be given a chance. So it was one and sixpence a week with me and down to the private school run by Miss Bronwen Rees of Abergavenny and become a professor in an American university.

I do love the spring and her bright colours, and the lambs doing cart-wheels down in Fair Meadow, which is what they called it until the ironmasters got hold of it and plundered and spoiled it.

But up above Vaynor the country was sweet and green, and there I would go most Sundays after Chapel and lie on my ear on the earth and listen to its music. For the earth speaks, says my teacher: the stones talk to the clay, the loam and pebbles give their opinion. For what is earth, says she, except the tongues of men gone to dust?

In love, me.

In love with Miss Bronwen Rees.

‘Hurry!’ cried Gwen, ‘we are late!’ And away down Bridge Street she went, fair hair flying, very keen, though she was not too special between the ears and twice two are seven.

‘Good morning, Bryn!’

‘’Morning, Mr. Waldo Phillips.’

‘Another scholar for Miss Bronwen Rees, is it?’ This from Mrs. Ten Benyon hanging out of her top window, very flourishing, as ladies are when they are making babies.

‘Ay ay, Mrs. Ten!’ Very fond of me was Mrs. Ten since I had been giving private lessons after school to her Owain and Cynfor; taking in Granfer Ben’s books and reading aloud to the family about how point five is half of one and the Union Jack is the colour of blood and if you put down a shilling the change out of three pints is ninepence at the New Inn but watch it at the Vaughan in Neath. And I reckon my granfer was the only drover in Wales who knew about places like Pola and Treviso and Roman generals like Ostorius Scapula.

‘Here are more of his books,’ my father used to say. ‘Learn, Bryn, learn. A scholar is worth ten labourers—anyone like me can lead a barge-horse.’

Spelling and making up poetry I am good at, but arithmetic, said my brother Ifor, who couldn’t count up to fifty, is mainly learned to help the masters make a fatter profit. Dewi, also, was dead against anybody making a profit, and he spent all his spare time reading papers by a chap called Engels and back copies of The Trumpet of Wales and pamphlets by William Lovett and Feargus O’Connor. And my gran used to get her fists up and shout about the flames of Hell and disbelief in God; though why this Engels boy and God should disagree on anything beat me, for both are bent on feeding the hungry, which was more than the masters were about this time on The Top.

Down Bridge Street after Gwen now, weaving through the gangs of colliers coming from the levels on the old canal, lovely with their noise and banter, many being Irish from the famine ships of Fishguard, and in rags: women were out on their doorsteps, scrubbing their little half-circles of purity into the world; others brooming away the night-soil tippling down the gutters, for there was no place in Bridge Street for it save fling it out of the window, and the whiff of it curled your nose first thing in the morning. In ranks five abreast went the colliers on shift, cold tea under their arms, picks and shovels on their shoulders, and the language they were raising must have stripped the paint off the door of Bethania half a mile south. Into their ranks I slipped, stretching my thighs to keep up with them.

‘Bore da’ chwi, Evan, lad!’

‘’Morning, Mr. Shonko!’

‘Off to school, is it?’

‘Ay, man!’

‘Make the most of it before old Crawshay gets hold of you.’

‘Yes, thank you, Mr. Shonko.’

‘That lovely sister of yours still activating?’

‘Sad, for your mam I am, my son,’ said Mr. Noah Morgan.

There was Afron Shavings, the carpenter, Bili Jones and Wil Shout, the old pack-horser, all down Crawshay’s canal levels, and Dai Central Eating with one tooth in his head: very partial to my mother, was Dai, in the Sunday School she took each week in the old Bethania, and I loved them all with their backslaps and insults.

I ran like a hare for the next half mile, through Pontmorlais, up to the school door: turn the handle; stand there gasping.

See her standing there in beauty, Miss Bronwen Rees of Abergavenny.

‘Good morning, Miss Rees.’

‘Good morning, Bryn Evan.’

Although she was Welsh speaking, she never spoke Welsh. Her grandfather, it seemed, though Welsh in name, was born fifty yards over the Hereford border, and she had an uncle living in London who was a quarter English, on his mother’s side. Besides, in fifty years Welsh will be a foreign language, said she, so anbody talking it in by here I will hit to Cyfarthfa and back return journey.

But Welsh or English, one day I will set up house with Miss Bronwen Rees. I will build this house four square to the wind; boarded floors I will give it, two rooms up, two down. And I will make a track from the mail-coach road through the Beacons, with flowers either side and more around the door. Nine boys and one girl I will fetch from Miss Bronwen Rees, God willing.

‘Take your seat, please, Bryn Evan. Do not stand there staring.’

There is a voice to drive the chaps demented.

I took my place at the back with the scholars—people like Joey Randy whose da took the big stallion once a week up to Penyard, behind Cyfarthfa, and collected six guineas, and living on immoral earnings as plain as your face, said Dewi. There was Owen Bach, spit and image of the Wild Welshman who tamed the mad bulls down the Vale of Neath, and Davie Half-Moon who was bats round the chimney, like his poor old mam and dad. Mick O’Shea of Connemara was there, thicker in the mouth than a Chinese, and girls, too, though none worth a mention, our Gwen being the best in sight with her seven teeth missing in front, and ghastly when smiling. For me, indeed, there was only one female there—Miss Bronwen Rees.

Sit with your chin on your hands and watch from the back of the class.

Small, she was, large at the top and small at the bottom, and with a fine dignity. Black was her hair, flowing either side of her face in waves of mystery. And her face I have seen but once before when my father took me fishing down to Giant’s Grave. Calm and pure was that face in the shop window. The Madonna, Dada explained, but did not tell more, though I recall that she had a baby in her arms and her red heart outside her dress, but it was her eyes.

It was her eyes.

‘Bryn Evan, kindly pay attention.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Dewi, who kept a list of all the useful females, had her age down as seventeen, my Bronwen. This would make her twenty-two when I was sixteen, the m